To these things, and particularly to absolute secrecy, Tim was
sworn by the most awful of oaths; and so he and his master parted. A
week later a carriage was driven up to Tim's residence in the dead of
the night, and a small bundle of caterwauling humankind was transferred
from the one to the other. Such was the beginning of the life of young
Queed. The woman, his mother, had died a day or two before, and where
she had been buried Tim had no idea.
So the years passed, while the Queeds watched with amazement the subtly
expanding verification of the adage that blood will tell. For Mr.
Surface, said Tim, had been a great scholard, and used to sit up to all
hours reading books that Thomason, the butler, couldn't make head nor
tail of; and so with Surface's boy. He was the strange duckling among
chickens who, with no guidance, straightway plumed himself for the seas
of printed knowledge. Time rolled on. When Surface was released from
prison, as the papers announced, there occurred not the smallest change
in the status of affairs; except that the monthly remittances now bore
the name of Nicolovius, and came from Chicago or some other city in the
west.
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